The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning

In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning is the title of Frank Sinatra's 1955 concept album as well as of its opening song.  THC has featured Sinatra before and prefers his ballads to anything else and this album is all ballads.

The album became his biggest hit since 1947.  In the late 40s, Sinatra's career hit the skids as his popularity dipped, movies flopped and his ability to sing was impaired by problems with his vocal chords.  By 1952 he had lost his contract with Columbia Records.  The next year Sinatra's acting career revived when he got a major role in From Here To Eternity (how he got the role is still subject to a lot of speculation; see, for instance, The Godfather) for which he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.  He also learned to sing in a different style, with less sweetness and more baritone than in his younger years.  His voice was not as good as it used to be but he became a much better singer.

In 1954 he released two successful albums, Songs For Young Lovers and Swing Easy!, but it was the April 1955 release of In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, with impeccable arrangements by Nelson Riddle that completely revitalized his singing career and reputation.  The somberness and sadness of the collection of songs was influenced by the 1954 breakup of Sinatra's tumultuous marriage with Ava Gardner.

Here's the title cut, with its achingly anguished vocal, written by David Mann and Bob Hilliard.

Forgotten Americans: Bayard Rustin

(Martin Luther King Jr and Bayard Rustin, via Washington Post)

• He was the organizer of the 1963 March On Washington at which Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech and an advisor on the tactics of non-violence to King since 1956 but in the years leading up to the March the other leaders of the civil rights movement worked to keep his role in the background.

• He was a former Communist and life-long Socialist who supported American intervention in Vietnam and decried Soviet and Cuban intervention in Africa.

• In a 1972 speech he criticized the "reactionary politics of the Nixon administration" as well as the "irresponsibility and elitism of 'New Politics' liberals" [the McGovern supporters who had seized control of the Democratic Party].

Bayard Rustin was born on March 17, 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania and raised as a Quaker and pacifist.  He died in 1987 while on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.

As a young man in the 1930s he became involved in the emerging civil rights movement and also a member of the Young Communist League in 1936.  The League, under the direction of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), which, in turn, was under the direction of Joseph Stalin, supported civil rights for African-Americans.  After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in  August 1939, the CPUSA agitated to keep the US out of WWII. However, in June 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPUSA was directed by Stalin to do everything possible to get the US to enter WWII and to cease its civil rights advocacy. 

This change prompted Bayard Rustin to resign from the CPUSA and join the Socialist Party, led by Norman Thomas.  Over time Rustin was to develop into a firm anti-Communist like many others who fled the Party.  It is often forgotten that there was a strong anti-communist left during the 1930s and 1940s and one of the most prominent anti-communists was Norman Thomas who considered himself a democratic socialist and was repulsed by the dictatorial and secretive practices of the communists.

During WWII, Rustin was part of a group planning a March on Washington in support of civil rights for African Americans.  President Roosevelt, desperate to avoid anything that would detract from the war effort held a White House meeting with Rustin and the other leaders at which they agreed to suspend their plans in return for which FDR issued an Executive Order banning discrimination in the defense industry and federal agencies.

As a pacifist, Rustin resisted induction during WWII and was jailed from 1944 to 1946.  After his release he organized the first Freedom Rides to test the desegregation of interstate transport, an effort that resulted in him spending 22 days on a North Carolina chain gang during 1947 (a few years earlier he had tried to board a bus from Louisville to Nashville and been badly beaten).  The following year he journeyed to India to learn about non-violent protest tactics from disciples of Mahatma Gandhi.

His association with Martin Luther King began in 1956 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and he worked closely with Rev King over the next few years helping organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which became King's primary vehicle for the civil rights struggle.  Rustin's talents for organization were recognized and he ended up pulling together the famous 1963 event in Washington DC.  Through these years he was often kept in the background by other civil rights leaders.  The reason was not so much his communist background as his homosexuality, a fact he did not hide (though the combination led to a massive FBI file).  This was at a time when homosexual practices were subject to prosecution in every American state and Rustin himself had been arrested in Pasadena, California in 1953.  The uneasiness this engendered could be seen when Rustin was forced off the SCLC Board by a fellow Board member, US Rep Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), who threatened to go public about Rustin's sexual orientation.

Several weeks before the March an incident occurred which changed some attitudes within the movement.  Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Bayard Rustin and placed the entire file of his Pasadena arrest into the Congressional Record.  This caused many Rustin's fellow Civil Rights leaders to rally around him and he was given his due as the organizer of the March as can be seen by the cover of the September 6, 1963 issue of Life Magazine where he is pictured along with A Philip Randolph with a heading noting that they were "The Leaders" of the March.

After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act splits began to emerge within the civil rights movement and Rustin increasing found himself out of sync with some of the new trends.  He rejected identity politics, believing that alliances with labor and across racial lines were what was needed to achieve full equality and economic prosperity for African-Americans.  Here is an excerpt from his 1962 debate with Malcolm X about this very topic.  The debate was at a time when Malcolm was still associated with the Nation of Islam from whom he later split, a defection that led to his murder in 1965.

He later went on to a senior role with the AFL-CIO in an attempt to further cooperation between African Americans and labor.

Named Honorary Chairperson of the Socialist Party of America in 1972, he also found himself, on foreign policy issues, increasingly at odds with the New Left and the Democratic Party of the 1970s and 80s.  Rustin's anti-communism was considered outmoded by these groups who prided themselves on being anti-anti communists.  It had started in the 1960s when Rustin opposed American withdrawal from Vietnam without a negotiated settlement, though he was also harshly critical of the tactics employed by the Johnson Administration.  It continued in the 1970s when Rustin denounced the active policy of intervention by the Soviet Union and Cuba in sub-Saharan Africa as well as opposing the Soviets' expansionist foreign policy.  He also worked with Senator  Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) on legislation to link US-Soviet trade relations to the plight of Soviet Jews and he organized a black group in support of Israel at a time when both leftists and black leaders were becoming less sympathetic to Israel.

How Rustin is remembered today tells us less about the man and more about current trends in our society.   As Cathy Young noted in her 2013 piece in Real Clear Politics, when Rustin died in 1987 any mention of his homosexuality was avoided by the NY Times in his obituary.  Today, it is the lead in any piece on him.  At the same time his anti-communism and neocon views on foreign policy (Rustin became a frequent contributor to Commentary, the birthplace of neoconservatism) have been pretty much written out of the record.  Young writes of his views on pacifism later in life:

Rustin bluntly stated, “Whereas I used to believe that pacifism had a political value, I no longer believe that.” He still considered himself a pacifist insofar as he had a strong interest in non-military means to defend freedom, which he now regarded as the most important value; without such feasible alternatives, he argued, it was “ridiculous…to talk only about peace.”

In contrast, most of the articles THC looked at in researching this post contained NO mention of this aspect of his political life, including the bio released by the White House when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.  Here's a typical example.  One can hope that the day will come when we can discuss all the aspects of this compelling figure.  Cathy Young best captures Rustin, and his lessons for us:

Labels aside, Bayard Rustin was a great American and a true hero. He had firsthand experience of oppression and prejudice; yet for him, human rights activism was never about solidarity with his own group but about freedom, justice and dignity for all. He had firsthand experience of the shortcomings of Western democracy—yet he understood that it was the bulwark of the values he believed in, and that it’s worth fighting for. His legacy presents a challenge to both left and right: to the right, a warning against demonizing social democratic politics and gay advocacy (which Rustin embraced late in life, less as a personal cause than as an integral part of the human rights struggle); to the left, a warning against treating the West and its allies as the cause of all ills.

 

Bolivian Death Road

If you're tired of vacations where all you do is just sit around and are looking for some adventure consider driving La Carretera de los Yungas, more popularly known as the Bolivian Death Road (aka The World's Most Dangerous Highway as described by DangerousRoads.org).  Running from Bolivia's capital, La Paz to the city of Coroico, the Yungas Road is 50 miles long, unpaved, 10 feet wide, much of it above 10,000 feet elevation with sheer drops of up to 3,000 feet, no guard rails and subject to frequent mud and rock slides.  Two to three hundred travelers a year lose their lives on the road.

Here's a typical day on the road:
For some background and further views of the road watch this video.  At the end it features a man who lost his family on the road in 1978 and now serves as a one-person traffic crew at a particularly dangerous spot.

Passing In The Night

Iaeger, West Virginia, August 2, 1956 

From Smithsonian.com a nice story on New York photographer O. Winston Link who spent five years in the late 1950s documenting the end of the steam-powered locomotive era in coal country.  At the local drive-in, Link approached a young couple on a date and asked if they would sit in his convertible for a staged shot.  Smithsonian.com describes Link's planning for the shot of what is a vanished time in America:

Link had already timed the Norfolk and Western Freight No. 78, whose locomotive was "the most beautiful engine ever built," in his book. He had set up 42 flashbulbs throughout the scene (plus one to highlight his car). After he talked Allen and Christian into indulging him, Link climbed a ladder to his tripod-mounted 4 x 5 and waited.

His timing was perfect—he wrote of being able to see only the locomotive's distant headlight coming down the tracks—but it wasn't enough. The explosion of light washed out what was on the movie screen at the moment; he had to print the image of the plane from a negative he'd made separately of that night's showing. The film, Battle Taxi, has been forgotten. But Link's picture holds up as a one-frame narrative of 20th-century transportation.
  

Robert Randolph Live!

If Duane Allman and Sly Stone had a child he would be Robert Randolph (it would also raise some eyebrows).  We saw Robert and the Family Band play at the Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix last week and it was even better than the last time we saw him in Tarrytown NY three or four years ago.  This is one of the best live acts you will ever see.  Robert's music is fun, pulsating and uplifting and he's a charismatic performer.

The Crescent Ballroom is a small venue with very little seating and capacity of a few hundred people.  THC doesn't know if it was the band or the venue but the sound quality was crisp and clear.

The cast of the Family Band has changed over the past few years.  Cousin Marcus is still on the drums but Cousin Danyell on bass has been replaced with Cousin AJ who looks and sounds like a younger version of Danyell.  The guitarist and keyboard players are also new.  All are excellent musicians.

Below are a couple of pictures and some brief video clips.  THC remains baffled why Randolph is not better known.

OK Corralapalooza Too

Yesterday THC (along with Ms THC) visited Tombstone in homage to Wyatt Earp and his swarm of brothers.  The 1881 events in Tombstone were previously discussed in OK Corralapalooza.

It's worth seeing the Cochise Country Courthouse in Tombstone.  Built in 1882, several months after the Earps and Doc Holliday left the town, the Courthouse houses a museum and is now a State Park.  The museum has many entertaining exhibits on the mining boom that led to the founding of Tombstone in 1879, the history and daily life in the town as well as the OK Corral gunfight.

(Tombstone Epitaph from day after gunfight with headline "Three Men Hurled Into Eternity In The Duration Of A Moment")

Once you've seen the museum, THC advises you git out of town as soon as possible.  It's a terrible and tacky tourist trap with competing OK Corral gunfight shows.  THC is a big fan of tacky but this was just too much.

Instead head about 20 miles south on state route 80 towards the copper mining town of Bisbee which is nestled into a canyon in the Mule Mountains about ten miles north of the border with Mexico (we ran into a Border Patrol checkpoint on our drive).  About two miles from Tombstone the highway comes down from a plateau and opens up on a wide panoramic vista that is the essence of what we think of as The West.  A few miles later you enter the mountains and then reach Bisbee.

From 1910 to the mid-1970s, Bisbee's economy was built on an open pit copper mine run by Phelps Dodge located on the edge of town.  One of America's most notorious labor-management incidents of the early 20th century took place there in July 1917 when Phelps Dodge, working with local law enforcement and perhaps 2,000 vigilantes who had been deputized as a posse, deported to New Mexico (yes, you are reading that correctly) over 1,000 workers associated with the International Workers of the World Union in what became known as the Bisbee Deportation.

(The mine pit today)

(Bisbee Daily Review, July 1917, warning of planned deportation action "All Women And Children Keep Off Streets Today")

Today, Bisbee is primarily a tourist town but much more tolerable and beautifully situated than Tombstone.  Most of the inhabitants seem to be refugees from a time past, giving the town some of the vibe of Mendocino in 1974.